emperley. The Red House was not, it would seem, an
ever-flowing fount of sustaining port wine and spiritually nourishing
literature. The moral evolution of the village had proceeded on those
lines. The prevailing feeling was vaguely hostile; neither Mrs. Gullick
nor Mrs. Dodge exactly knew why. Mrs. Dodge said that her husband (who
was the sexton and gravedigger) had found Mrs. Temperley always ready
for a chat. He spoke well of her. But Dodge was not one of many. Mrs.
Temperley was perhaps too sensitively respectful of the feelings of her
poorer neighbours to be very popular among them. At any rate, her habits
of seclusion did not seem to village philosophy to be justifiable in the
eyes of God or man. Her apparent fondness for the society of the dead
also caused displeasure. Why she went to the churchyard could not be
imagined: one would think she had a family buried there, she who was,
"as one might say, a stranger to the place," and could not be supposed
to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin!

Mrs. Temperley, however, appeared to be able to dispense with this
element of attraction in the "grassy barrows." She and a company of
youthful Cochin-China fowls remained for hours among them, on this
cheerful morning, and no observer could have determined whether it was
the graves or the fowls that riveted her attention. She had perched
herself on the stile that led from the churchyard to the fields: a
slender figure in serviceable russet and irresponsible-looking hat,
autumn-tinted too, in sympathy with the splendid season. In her ungloved
left hand, which was at once sensitive and firm, she carried a book,
keeping a forefinger between the pages to mark a passage.

Her face bore signs of suffering, and at this moment, a look of baffled
and restless longing, as if life had been for her a festival whose
sounds came from a hopeless distance. Yet there was something in the
expression of the mouth, that suggested a consistent standing aloof from
herself and her desires. The lines of the face could never have been
drawn by mere diffusive, emotional habits. Thought had left as many
traces as feeling in the firm drawing. The quality of the face was of
that indefinable kind that gives to all characteristic things their
peculiar power over the imagination. The more powerful the quality, the
less can it be rendered into terms. It is the one marvellous, remaining,
musical fact not to be defined that mak